vCam AS3 v1.1

Announcing vCam AS3 v1.1 for Flash! For those who aren't familiar with vCam, I'll offer a brief explanation. In 2005, Sham Bhangal and Dave Dixon released the original vCam or "virtual camera" for Flash.  Let's say a Flash developer is working on an animation and wants the animation to pan from left to right.  Without the vCam, the developer would have to create tweens for each layer in the timeline.  Using the vCam, however, the developer can animate a single vCam instance on the timeline to create the same pan.  Simply place the vCam on the left side of the stage and create a motion tween to the right side of the stage. Publish out the file and the scene pans with a single  tween! The original vCam can also be used to adjust size and add color transformations.

Now vCam AS3 brings a new array of options with added features including:

- Rotation
- Blur
- Brightness/Contrast
- Hue/Saturation
- and more!

Sham and Dave were very generous and offered the original vCam free of charge. Therefore I am also offering this new version for free. Have fun all!

Version 1.1 has been optimized and the bitmap data processing has been removed.

Download vCam AS3 v1.1 FLA (Requires Flash CS3 and Actionscript 3)

*** Note: A bug in Flash CS3 causes stage.stageHeight to be -100 the actual stageHeight if the bandwidth profiler is open. Either close the profiler or view the SWF outside flash.

The animation below shows the vCam AS3 animated on the stage:

This movie requires Flash Player 9

The animation below is the resulting swf file:

This movie requires Flash Player 9

24 comments

24 Comments so far

  1. Shane April 29th, 2008 11:42 pm

    Very, very good improvement on vCam by Sham and Dave.

    I’ll use this straight away! (and tell everyone about it)

  2. Yevgeniy May 9th, 2008 5:19 am

    Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Best Flash tool ever! With AS 3 it’s even better!

  3. WilR June 16th, 2008 11:52 am

    THANKS :D

  4. Jamie Glasby July 30th, 2008 2:24 pm

    Love this nifty tool and I’m now using it to make tweens simpler in all my animations. However I can’t figure out how to change the colours and brightness/contrast. Hope someone can point me in the right direction. Other than that I love it thanks a bunch Bryan.

    J Glasby

  5. tris November 22nd, 2008 10:02 pm

    You are my saviour, ’nuff said

  6. Mishael December 17th, 2008 9:40 am

    Ok, This so very nice look and very powerfull, but if i need do animation for tv, how to get avi file with this camera?

  7. Quinn February 7th, 2009 8:56 pm

    thanks so much for this… this tool is ingenious

  8. Brad February 12th, 2009 9:34 am

    Is this vcam compatible with CS4? It might need to be updated. I’ve been using it for a while on a cartoon I’m making in CS4 and if I have several tweens going on it slows down the cartoon to the point of not being watchable while zoomed in with the vcam. I love this tool so much and it’s practically a necessity for Flash, I hope to keep using it. Thanks

  9. Ronald Nicholls June 15th, 2009 6:41 am

    Thank you guys so much for making something this great !
    i used it in my 2nd year portfolio project for multimedia design
    witch than was transfered over to my actual online port.
    and now that there is a as3 version i cant wait to finally update my website in as3.

  10. eddy June 22nd, 2009 2:31 pm

    Thanks guys!

  11. Brad Sedito July 3rd, 2009 1:44 am

    amazing work guys… flash creativity at its best. I will absolutely be commenting the code I make with a link back to VCam if I use it – awesome job!

    - Brad

  12. Reeoz August 17th, 2009 7:24 pm

    Nice! But I’ve got a problem. When I zoom in more than 150%, the frame rate reaally slows down. Which is kind of weird, and I know it’s not my computer. I’ve tried lowering quality to “low”, but the Frame rate still is incredibly down. Why does this happen?

    BTW, there’s not too much going in the scene at the moment

  13. Mohammad Taghi Karimi August 30th, 2009 3:15 pm

    hello man
    i love you with this f@#$ing vcam its too good
    i found it by chance i think the god send ur link to me
    when i was making animation in flash i always doing camera things by hand and for this reson i decided to use toon boom and now i think toon boom is juz Sh!t HA HA HA
    god bless you man

  14. Daniel September 9th, 2009 11:09 pm

    Hi,

    Firstly I want to say that I love vCam, it makes creating camera effects really easy and enables me to do alot more with my animations.

    I had one question about vCam though. For some reason when I export as an .AVI for example, the export is not shown from the camera’s perspective and you can see the whole screen instead of just what is inside the camera lens. Is it possible to avoid this?

  15. Satorion December 9th, 2009 5:57 pm

    Thank you very much for your free VCam, i have a problem though, im using this for a space game where the cam is fixed to the coordinates of the ship.

    This is no problem, but as soon as i shoot ( place lasers in the same parent object as the ship, aswell as the cam) the lasers leave fragments of themselves behind as long as im not moving.

  16. bryan January 11th, 2010 1:41 pm

    Flash doesn’t compute ActionScript animation when renderning AVIs. Try exporting it as a Quicktime and convert it to an AVI later.

  17. Karlind Govender January 25th, 2010 10:37 am

    Hey Bryan

    Thanks for the VCam it is awesome!! but for some reason when I take the flash exported quicktime into final cut pro 6.04 the vcam effect ie zoom is not smooth, how can I avoid the jerky playback in final cut pro, my flash and final cut screen dimensions are 1920 x 1080 and so is the dimensions of the VCam, my final cut project is HD.

    Thanks again for this brilliant tool! Happy 2010 from South Africa

    Karlind

  18. jordan February 6th, 2010 10:00 am

    hi, i got one problem, when i save it as a movie, the resulting movie is not as the same the movement of the camera, instead it shows how the camera move in the scene.. how can i fix that?

  19. Josh March 3rd, 2010 3:28 am

    Am I the only one that when I click on either of the VCam links I get gibberish symbols, some actual coding, and ending with more gibberish symbols??

    Is it possibly my computer?? Please help I would love to use this!

  20. bryan March 12th, 2010 4:47 pm

    You are probably using Safari. Try another browser.

  21. Andrei Nemes March 25th, 2010 5:59 am

    Is it possible to use graphic overlays built in the camera? or I have to make my stuff follow the camera object?
    Great code btw, I LOVE it!

  22. bryan March 29th, 2010 11:21 am

    You can build overlays into the camera. Just make sure nothing goes outside the boundary of the camera and change “visible=true” in the camera code.

  23. Brad March 31st, 2010 9:44 am

    Ugh. This camera seems really great!

    But for the animation I’m making, it needs to be HD format, so my stage is 1280×720. Which this camera doesn’t seem to like, as I experience MASSIVE amounts of lag. Although, while working on the default stage size or 550×400, it seems to work fine.

    Is there any work around for this?

  24. bryan April 12th, 2010 12:11 pm

    Depending on the filters/effects you are using it might be too much for the Flash player to handle. How are you deploying your animation? If you are deploying as a video I suggest rendering your animation as an image sequence (FILE>EXPORT>EXPORT MOVIE>PNG SEQUENCE) and then compiling it with a video editing package.

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